Cap'n Buck, the antagonist of this story, was the most despicable, amoral, ignorant character that I have ever come across in a middle grade book. The saddest part is that he is representative of real slave-catchers who were just as brutal, if not more so.I listened to the audio book (which helped with the dialect) and at times I had to stop listening because the events were so upsetting.The second half of the book was a bit easier to handle than the first half, especially as Charlie begins to think for himself and to question his role in the Cap'n's mission. Part of the book takes place in Canada and I enjoyed learning how progressive Canada was in the pre-Civil War period. Little Charlie's innocent reactions to the Canadian way of life were endearing.This was a very tough read, but rewarding.

Comments

Flag Abuse

Flagging a post will send it to the Goodreads Customer Care team for review.
We take abuse seriously in our discussion boards.
Only flag comments that clearly need our attention.
As a general rule we do not censor any content on the site.
The only content we will consider removing is spam,
slanderous attacks on other members,
or extremely offensive content (eg. pornography, pro-Nazi, child abuse, etc).
We will not remove any content for bad language alone, or being critical
of a particular book.